SEO Software is a tool that is used to optimize content marketing. It helps in improving the overall SEO ranking of your website by making it more visible to search engines and users.
There are many SEO tools available on the market but choosing one can be quite difficult as they all have their own unique features, pros and cons.
We have reviewed some of the best free SEO software tools that you can use to improve your site’s rankings. These tools will help you identify what needs improvement on your website so that you can make changes accordingly.
Search Engine Optimization Seo Software
1. Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, check and fix broken links on your website,and get an overview of your best-performing pages (so you can see what information is drawing in the visitors).
Syed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favorite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. We add our site and those of our competitors to it. The tool then shows us the sites which have backlinked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so easy if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
2. Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing.
3. SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that they let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with related keywords, social shares and word count. This gives me a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimize. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, and love using its site audit to optimize our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
4. KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool
An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.
George Perry, an SEM Specialist at Bandwidth, raves about KWFinder. “I like that not only does it show me information on the keyword that I was searching for, but pulls in good suggestions for related terms, and how they compare (volume, CPC, difficulty, etc.) to the term I originally looked at. I’ve been able to help my clients target not only those big, pie in the sky vanity terms, but to better target those terms that are lower in the funnel and more likely to convert, allowing me to target them through focused content that answers the questions they’re actually asking.”
5. Moz Pro: SEO Software
SEO software Moz Pro keeps popping up as one of the best SEO tools that experts actually use. Some specialists raved about how Moz was always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes. Others praised Moz’s chat portal that allows them always to get an insightful response to every question asked. Whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it. They also have a free MozBar toolbar that you can download to see your website’s metrics while browsing any page. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, you should also consider checking out MozCon, their annual conference.
Keri Lindenmuth’s, Marketing Manager at Kyle David Group, go-to SEO tool is none other than Moz Pro. She says, “My favorite feature of the tool is its ‘page optimization feature.’ It tells you exactly what steps you can take to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. For example, it will tell you to ‘Include your keyword in this page title’ or ‘Add an image with a keyword alt tag.’ This tool has substantially improved our client’s business simply by the fact that it gives increased transparency. We can compare their site’s traffic and optimization to that of their competitors. We can see which pages and search terms their competitors perform well in and alter our web practices to compete against theirs. Without a tool like Moz, SEO really becomes a guessing game. You have no idea where you’re doing well and where you can use improvement.”
6. Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest, developed by Neil Patel, is a free keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them by showing the top ranking SERPsFrom short to long-tail phrases, you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great keyword tool. Metrics Ubersuggest includes in its reports are keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. Great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
7. Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around keywords like fitness, yoga, running, Crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would only take you five minutes, making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favorite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimizing the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
8. SpyFu: Free SEO Tools
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads, and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
Adele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past, but SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favorite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs. their organic standings, review their core keywords, and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
9. Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool
As a top SEO analysis tool, Woorank offers free and paid options to track and report your marketing data. You can plug in your competitors to discover which keywords they are targeting so you can overlap with theirs. Try understanding how keywords perform over time to optimize for users and search engines in the best way possible. And most importantly, understand the things your website is lacking from both a technical and content perspective. Woorank can help you identify duplicate content, downtime, and security issues and provide guidelines on how to fix them.
10. Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic is one of the best marketing SEO tools according to experts. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have. It also works as an SEO keyword tool to find the best keywords to target while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank.
Ryan Scollon, SEO Consultant at RyanScollon.co.uk recommends the SEO tool Majestic. He says, “My favorite SEO tool is Majestic, with its main feature allowing you to check the backlinks of a website that you specify. My favorite feature is the ability to add your own client’s site and a bunch of competitors, allowing you to easily compare a variety of SEO metrics such as trust flow, referring domain count, and external backlinks count. Not only does it help us understand the [client’s optimization] weaknesses, but it also provides a simple table that we share with our clients, so they too can understand the problems and how they stack up to their competitors. We also use Majestic to audit competitors’ backlinks, as we can sometimes find a handful of easy opportunities to tackle before moving onto other link building tactics.”
seo tools for digital marketing
According to our analysis, these are the top 5 SEO tools in the 2021 market. For all SEO tools we have included a scenario where they could be beneficial to you. It is important to clarify that they are not ranked and arranged in a particular order.
- Spyfu
Spyfu is a search analysis tool that offers SEO research, PPC research, keyword research, SERP checker, and domain overviews. One of the most loved features is Spyfu Kombat. In the blog Kombat Overview (Shared Keywords) by Sidra Condron, Kombat is described as “easy to start and nearly fool-proof to understand”.
According to Spyfu’s website, PC Mag has awarded Spyfu with the “editors’ choice” badge and has also been categorized by G2crowd as part of the “Top 50 Products for Marketing 2020”.
By adding this tool into your kit, you will be able to search any domain and find out everyplace the domain shows up on Google. As listed on Spyfu’s website, by doing so you will be able to see “every keyword they’ve bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 14 years.” Furthermore, you will be able to learn how to connect with these domains, find online and traditional leads methods such as social media, email, phone, and address.
How to best use Spyfu
Spyfu Kombat can be especially handy when doing keyword research. For example, you have a client who would like to find out what keywords their competitors are ranking for to generate keyword ideas for new content. Moreover, your client has a PPC campaign already running and is wondering if there is room for improvement.
When utilizing Spyfu Kombat, all you need is to do is to input your client’s domain and compare it against their competitor’s domain. By doing this, you will be able to find out what keywords your client is not ranking for that their competitors are in both organic and paid searches. After obtaining this information, your client can generate new content that will target those better performing keywords.
In terms of the PPC campaign that they are looking for optimizations, Spyfu Kombat can help you determine wasteful keywords to drop and update them with new ones that will outperform the previous keywords. In short, you’ll become the best digital marketer spy in the industry.
Spyfu Pricing
*This image was taken in October 2020. We recommend checking Spyfu’s pricing page for the most updated information. According to this page, if you decide this tool isn’t for you, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- SEMRush
SEMRush is an all-inclusive suite that will help optimize your marketing workflow. It covers SEO, advertising, social media, content, competitive research, and reporting.
According to SEMRush’s website, “SEMrush is recognized as the best SEO suite according to US Search Awards 2019, MENA Search Awards 2019, and SEMY Awards 2019. It is also the best digital tool, according to Interactive Marketing Awards 2019.”
Some of their 6,000,000 users are eBay, Philips, HP, Quora, and many others. Quite an impressive list. It is fair to say that SEMRush is one of the most popular and purchased tools in the industry.
How to best use SEMRush
When clients ask you to generate a backlink audit, SEMRush is your best option. With this tool, you can generate a comprehensive backlink report from your client’s competitors and let you compare your client’s backlinks to up to 5 domains. Moreover, it can help you discover backlink opportunities and clean your client’s link profile.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of link building, make sure to read our blog “Research Tips to Gain SEO Friendly Links” by DeltaV Digital Partner, Keith Vera.
SEMRush Pricing
*This image was taken in October 2020. We recommend checking the SEMRush pricing page for the most updated information. According to this page, there is a 7-day free trial.
- MOZ Pro
According to MOZ Pro’s website, Moz Pro is considered “the proven, all-in-one SEO toolset” that will provide you with SEO solutions for every need that will help you achieve success. A shortened list of Moz Pro’s features are site audits, rank tracking audits, site crawls, backlink analysis, keyword research, and more. Upon signing up to MOZ Pro, every plan includes a full access to MozBar(SEO toolbar for Chrome), track keywords on multiple search engines, SEO insights, one-on-one walkthrough, and 24-hour online support.
Some of the companies that have successfully used Moz Pro are Otter, Razorfish, Zillow, and many more. Jason Nurmi, the marketing manager at Zillow mentions in Moz Pro’s website that this tool has given his team the necessary data to justify projects and strategies. Moreover, it has helped them track the ROI of their efforts.
How to best use MOZ Pro
When assigned to fix your client’s common technical SEO issues give MOZ Pro a chance. When using MOZ Pro to create a site crawl and audit, it will help you find those technical SEO issues and also show you how to fix them.
For example, MOZ Pro will monitor broken redirects and missing title tags. Lastly, it will also assist you by prioritizing the issues to make sure you tackle those who need your immediate assistance.
Moz Pro’s Pricing
*This image was taken in October 2020. We recommend checking the MOZ Pro for the most updated information. According to this page, there is a free 30-day trial.
- Ahrefs
As described in the Ahrefs website, this tool is an “all-in-one SEO toolset” where you can optimize your website, analyze your competitors, study your customers’ searches, analyze your industry’s top-performing content, and track your ranking progress. Something important to mention is that Ahrefs offers free learning material that anyone can access without spending the $7.00 on trial. Upon making your decision whether Ahrefs is the right tool for you, you can sign up for the 7-day trial.
How to best use Ahrefs
Let’s say you are prepping for your company’s new blog, but have no clue on what to write about that will perform. With Ahref’s content explorer, you can discover the best content that exists in your industry by pulling competitive content research that will help you determine which content your blog should be about that will outperform your competitors’ content.
As shown in the image from Ahref’s website, all you need to do is type your general idea on the tool’s search bar and it will show you a list of pages that have content around your general idea. In addition to finding low competition topics and link building prospects.
Ahref’s Pricing
*This image was taken in October 2020. We recommend checking the Ahrefs pricing page for the most updated information. According to to his page, there is a 7-day trial for $7.00
- Google Keyword Planner
The Google Keyword Planner tool is a great resource for building a robust and strong keyword list that will substantially set your PPC campaign off to a good start. In overall terms, we can all agree that the Google Ads suite is the leading tool in PPC and SEO, but for the purpose of this blog, we chose to focus on Google Keyword Planner. According to the Google Keyword Planner’s website, “by using the Google Ads Keyword Tool, you can search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even combine keyword lists to create new ones.”
You will have four options to choose when using this tool. You could search for new keywords by typing a phrase, website, or category to generate new ideas. You could also combine two separate lists that you input to create new keyword combinations. Additionally, it can show you the historical trending and search volume data of keywords. Lastly, it can provide you with a click and cost performance forecast by giving you performance projections for your keywords’ lists based on bids average and your budget.
If you’d like to learn more about utilizing Google Keyword Planner, we invite you to check out “How to Use Google Keyword Planner in 2020” by Brian Dean.
How to best use Google Keyword Planner:
As you are setting up a new PPC campaign in Google Ads for a client that has never run one in the past, you will find this tool beneficial. Like mentioned earlier, to start your keyword inspiration, input your client’s website address into the tool, and it will provide you with a keyword list. On the results, you will be able to custom filter or organize your keywords by different parameters, such as average searches or competition. On top of that, you can add a term that you think could be a potential keyword, and it will also provide you with stats for that specific term.
Another way to use this tool is shown in the image below taken from Google Ads Help. Instead of utilizing your client’s domain, you could also type a general idea. As shown below, in this case the word used was “boots”. In the results we can see the list of keywords this tool generated including the average number of searches for each keyword and competition level.
Google Keyword Planner Pricing
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that you can access by creating a Google Ads account.
If you would like to learn more about Google prices, we invite you to read “The 10 Hidden Costs of Google Ads” by DeltaV Digital Sr. Digital Strategist, Carter Poore.
Feeling confident with our top 5 SEO tool list?
Overall, all of these tools are very similar in terms of what they can offer to you. Although not completely alike, we can see there is a general offer of an “all-in-one” SEO tool with individual offerings. From Spyfu “spying” on your client’s competitor’s website to Google Keyword Planner, giving you keyword inspiration, we can all agree that all these tools are phenomenal aids.
When researching for our top SEO tools, it was very surprising to find out that according to Search Engine Journal there are over 100 SEO tools in 2020. Therefore, it comes to your user experience and what you can benefit from. If you would like to find out more about them we invite you to read The 109 Best SEO Tools That Are Totally Free by Jon Clark.
At the end of the day, it comes to what fits your budget and your digital marketing needs. It will be interesting to compare our research results to those of next year. Ultimately, we are in an ever-evolving industry where today’s popular tools might become obsolete. If you think we forgot to mention your favorite tool, please comment below.
Conclusion
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